The World Wide Haxe Conference 2015 (WWX2015) is already over but had and huge impact on my understanding of the whole Haxe community. It was great to meet the people behind online avatars, talk to some of the super nerds and happily acknowledge that all of them are kind, helpful and good looking. 😉

I love the fact that Haxe can be used just as the perfect OOP-JavaScript alternative by “normal” web developers as well as (from my point of view) “hardcore” hardware near game developers for consoles.

We at Bayer und Preuss started using Haxe to target JavaScript and ActionScript in the first place, but now it’s obvious, that there are so much more benefits for our future. So we decided to tell our little story and future plans at the conference and share it with you. I’ll add the video and a transcript as soon as possible, but for now, here are my slides:

Haxe macros are said by many to be “black magic”, and in some ways they are—macros in Haxe are actual Haxe code (rather than macros in C/C++ for example, which are just fancy pre-processor directives). Macros are undoubtedly the most advanced feature of Haxe and probably the hardest to grasp, however I think a major reason for that is a lack of really solid documentation on the subject. To me, the Haxe docs regarding macros are somewhat obfuscated and leave something to be desired, and unfortunately there’s not a lot of other resources online. This is what led me to embark on my own journey of learning Haxe macros, and hopefully starting to shed a little more light on their mystery.

ECMAScript programmers (JavaScript, ActionScript, etc) are familiar with writing object literals in JSON notion. This appears to work in Haxe, but you’ll quickly run into pitfalls and type issues. A bit of background about the Haxe type system will help you avoid a lot of frustration.